Edward Lauer’s little boy is long buried, his wife remarried, his happiness a distant memory.

He can never get them back.

But the bumbling government that ruined his life can be made to pay.

Last week, a state appeals court ruled that the 51-year-old subway motorman from Queens has the right to sue the city for hounding him as the main suspect in his son’s death – hounding him for almost two years after police should have been told the boy had died of natural causes.

His $60 million suit will go forward. But money cannot make up for what happened to him.

Lauer and his wife, Lisa, brought their 3-year-old son, Andrew, to St. John’s Queens Hospital on Aug. 6, 1993, because the boy was suffering from dry heaves and nausea.

The doctors decided the boy was going to be fine and sent him home, Edward Lauer said in a court petition filed with his suit.

The medical examiner performed an autopsy the next day and issued a death certificate listing as the immediate cause of death “blunt injuries of neck and brain” – homicide.

The police were notified.

They spent 12 hours interrogating Edward Lauer while he grieved over his lost child.

They went to his son’s funeral.

“Detectives … obviously attempting to force loved ones to turn against me, appeared at the funeral home and stood at my son’s bier informing members of my family and friends that I had murdered my little boy,” Lauer said.

His hell deepened.

People in his Maspeth neighborhood shouted at him, spat at him, and called him a baby-killer, said Lauer’s lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., of the firm Leahey and Johnson.

Lisa Lauer, relentlessly peppered by cops for more information about her husband, began believing the worst.

No one told him or the cops that a month after Andrew Lauer’s death in 1993 Medical Examiner Dr. Eddy Lilavois performed a more thorough autopsy and determined that Andrew had died of a brain aneurysm.